Happy Friday. This morning — a report on yesterday’s dramatic foreclosure hearing in Congress, plus a take on why the word “stimulus” isn’t being used much anymore.
Foreclosures: Who’s being helped, who’s being left out? (PBS NewsHour)
Why mortgage principal reduction isn’t happening (Felix Salmon)
Bankers are always on the look-out for a good excuse not to engage in principal write-downs, and this is another arrow to add to their quiver of such excuses: doing so will enrage and inflame their customer base.
Lehman’s desperate housewives (Vanity Fair)
On Wall Street, they pay you so much that they own you. You know? So it’s different. They have your soul. You gave it to them for the money.
They’re not calling the stimulus bill a stimulus bill anymore (Real Clear Markets)
The term “shovel ready” seems to have disappeared from the language just as quickly as it arrived. The idea that greater public borrowing would leverage capital expenditures to put the U.S. back to full employment is now replaced by boasts that Washington has saved Albany, Springfield and Sacramento from laying-off government workers. Whatever the value of that gold-plated jobs program, it is not “stimulus.”
China’s pollution just keeps circling the earth (The Raw Story)
Pollution from Asia’s booming economies rises into the stratosphere during the monsoon season then circles the world for years, according to a report out Thursday.
GM hopes to win back those “Who killed the Electric Car?” people (NPR)
A decade ago, GM angered customers who leased its first electric car, the EV1, when it canceled the program. Now, GM hopes to win those customers back — along with many more.
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